“The EEA is proud to sponsor the Festival’s Smart Legal Contracts Challenge, which will serve as a natural space to explore new types of smart contracts that benefit legal professionals and law firms alike,” said EEA Executive Director Ron Resnick. “The event will help show very quickly which new blockchain use cases are worth additional exploration by the EEA’s Legal Industry Working Group.”

“We’re thrilled that EEA is sponsoring the Smart Legal Contracts Challenge, and look forward to collaborating with them on this first-of-its-kind event,” said Jameson Dempsey, Director of Legal Hackers.

About the EEAThe Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Building upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production – Ethereum –the EEA defines enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly-demanding applications at the speed of business. For additional information about joining the EEA, please reach out to membership@entethalliance.org or visit https://entethalliance.org/

About Legal HackersLegal Hackers is a global grassroots movement of designers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, policy advocates, researchers, students, teachers, and technologists who explore and develop creative solutions to issues at the intersection of law and technology. We are a volunteer-run, chapter-based community that is free to join and open to all. Legal Hackers is not a commercial enterprise, trade association, or advocacy group. For more information, visit https://legalhackers.org/

Since we began in 2012, Legal Hackers has been guided by a singular mission: creating a free, open, and collaborative platform to explore and solve pressing issues at the intersection of law and technology. Today, as the largest grassroots legal innovation movement in the world, Legal Hackers is excited to partner with LexBlog to create a virtual home for each of our 80+ chapters.

This partnership will enable Legal Hackers chapters to better share the amazing things that their local communities have been doing, from legaltech demo nights, coding workshops, and hackathons, to policy discussions on hot-button issues related to artificial intelligence, blockchain technologies, the sharing economy, and more.

With help from the LexBlog platform and community, we hope to inspire legal innovators throughout the world to try “legal hacking” for themselves. We look forward to an enduring and productive collaboration with LexBlog, and thank Kevin, Bob, and the LexBlog team for supporting and amplifying our mission.

2017 marks five years since a handful of recently graduated law students in New York City started a Meetup group called “Legal Hackers” that sought to bring lawyers, technologists, and policy makers together to discuss issues at the intersection of law and technology. Since then, the movement grew quickly — from a second chapter in Washington, D.C. started by original New York Legal Hackers members, to organizing legal hackathons and Le Hackie awards, to new chapters spreading across the United States and then the world, to international summits that brought chapter organizers together to discuss law, technology, and community building.

Legal Hackers now boasts over 50 chapters across five continents. We couldn’t be prouder or more excited for how far the movement has come! We’d like to especially thank Jonathan Askin for his inspiration and continued evangelizing and support, all of our chapter organizers and participants across the world, and everyone who has ever spoken at a panel, competed in a legal hackathon, or spread the word about Legal Hackers. We look forward to fivemany more years of legal hacking around the world! (Antarctica chapter, anyone??)

Legal Hackers is proud to announce that Larry W. Bridgesmith and Caitlin “Cat” Moon have been honored with the Janice M. Holder Award by the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services for their work with Music City Legal Hackers organizing its first legal hackathon focused on access to justice! The Janice M. Holder Award recognizes an attorney, public servant, or other advocate “who has advanced the quality of justice statewide by ensuring that the legal system is open and available to all.”

Larry Bridgesmith, an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt Law School, and Cat Moon, who teaches legal design at Vanderbilt Law School, are the organizers of the Music City Legal Hackers chapter along with Lori Gonzalez and J.B. Ruhl. The Music City Legal Hackers’ LEGAL + Tech = A2J hackathon challenged participants to create solutions to actual problems submitted by Tennessee nonprofits in the legal space and awarded funds to the winners to continue their work.

On August 4-6, 2017, legal hackers from all over the world convened in Brooklyn, NY where Legal Hackers was born 5 years ago for our third international summit. Participants traveled from as far as Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, and Ukraine to discuss, share, and collaborate on how to improve access to and the practice of law using technology. Topics of discussion included access to justice, open data, tech policy, data science, and of course, the blockchain.

The hashtag for the event was #legalhack2017 and the entire summit was live streamed. The schedule and videos of the summit can be found below:

On May 27-28, 2017, Kyiv Legal Hackers hosted its first legal hackathon! The event was spread across two locations in the Ukraine, with over 150 people attending the pitch night for the 15 projects produced during the weekend. First prize went to Playbook, an app to help seed investors make sure their legal documents are correct from the start. The runner up was a bot that checks real estate listings for problems called Safe Property.

The Music City Legal Hackers, in conjunction with Code for Nashville, hosted their first legal hackathon on April 7-8, 2017 at Vanderbilt Law School! The hackathon challenged participants to solve problems submitted by Tennessee pro bono and “low bono” legal nonprofits. For those who were interested in legal hacking and access to justice, but did not want to join the hackathon, Massachusetts Legal Hackers organizer Dazza Greenwood led an unconference during the working portions of the hackathon.

Learn more about legal hackathons and see footage from the Music City Legal Hackathon below.

On December 14, 2016, the New York Legal Hackers chapter hosted a non-partisan panel discussion on what the state of technology policy might be over the next four years under President-Elect Trump. Watch the video below:

On July 15-17, 2016, legal hackers from all over the world traveled to Brooklyn, New York for the 2016 Legal Hackers International Summit. The hashtag for the summit was #legalhack2016, and the Saturday’s activities were live streamed. Schedule and videos are below.

Legal Hackers: Where We Are and Where We’re Going
Jameson Dempsey, Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
Phil Weiss, Fridman Law Group

What Legal Hackers Can Learn from the Original Hackers
Dan Lear, Dir. of Industry Relations, Avvo

In a lively panel discussion on March 2nd, the New York Legal Hackers explored the shifting perceptions of Bitcoin and the various regulatory regimes impacting cryptocurrencies. Over the past several years, virtual currencies such as Bitcoin have made headlines — first as an untraceable currency used largely by criminals, then as an easily lost asset as exchanges such as Mt. Gox collapsed after security breaches, and more recently as a tech savvy investment as venture capitalists began to pour capital into cryptocurrency companies. As cryptocurrencies have gained in popularity and acceptance, governments and regulatory bodies have struggled with the question of categorizing them as something for which regulations already exist (such as a currency, a security, or a commodity) or if it is something entirely different for which new regulations need to be created.

Moderator: Houman B. Shadab, Professor of Law at New York Law School and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Taxation and Regulation of Financial Institutions